My Posts Are Copyrighted, By the Way
On Fresh Air yesterday, Terry Gross interviewed Lawrence Lessing, a law professor who argues that the changes wrought by the internet require changes in copyright law. One of the examples he cited of copyright restrictions being overly strict involved a YouTube video of a small child dancing in her own, filmed by her mother for her grandmother to see. In the background you could hear a song by Prince, which is, presumably, what the girl was dancing to. YouTube was instructed by the record label to remove the video. (I know some labels and artists are much stricter about these things, and I know Prince is one of the most strict.) Lessing made the point that this mother committed a crime by posting this video under current law, but asked if this really should be criminal. That is a particularly good example for him to use, because if you consider how much copyrighted music surrounds us each day, it is very easy to run afoul of the law when videotaping in public. Imagine that you’re having a fine time hanging out on a game day here in beautiful Gainesville, Florida, and you shoot some video of you and your pals throwing a football around while the food is on the grill and the girlfriends are chatting amongst themselves. I can almost guarantee that somebody in the camper next to you is going to be playing their radio, and that audio bleeding into your video means that you’re guilty of copyright infringement by posting it online.
We live in the age of file sharing. Anyone who had a computer in the spring and summer of 2000 (which I dubbed the Summer of Napster), will recall what a big deal file sharing became. I distinctly remember the sense of urgency many felt when the lawsuits against Napster threatened to shut the service down. Everyone stayed home by their computers that night in a frantic orgy of downloading before it was too late. I also remember saying at the time that the world would never go back. The genie was out of the bottle, so to speak, and once people saw the benefit of having unlimited access to every song they ever loved for free, there would always be a service or program to satisfy that demand. Napster did eventually end, but the long Summer of Napster continues.
I say all this to make a point about copyright which relates to yesterday’s Fresh Air. Some argue that, since file sharing is so common, and copyright holders are “losing” so much money (I use quotes because I think that these artists are “losing” sales they never would have made in the first place: i.e., “people” will download Avril Lavigne for nothing, but they wouldn’t pay for it {I use quotes around “people” because I don’t think real humans could like Avril Lavigne}), that we should change the way royalties are collected. Lawrence Lessing referred to a system in which file sharing is legal, downloads are tracked, and royalties are paid to copyright holders based on the number of downloads. These fees might be collected from ISPs according to one proposal. My problem with that system is that it requires people who do not download songs, or download only a few, to pay for the hobby of those who download hundreds or thousands of songs.
Perhaps the best point that Lawrence Lessing made related to the meaning and intent of copyright itself. If you are like me, you probably assumed that copyright exists to guarantee that the intellectual property of creative individuals remains valuable through protection from theft. Apparently this is not what the founding fathers intended. For them, copyright was designed to ensure continued creativity by offering temporary protection from theft of intellectual property. As Lessing pointed out in the interview, George Gershwin or Robert Frost write music and poetry with the understanding that their creations belong to them. But since neither man is alive, the copyright that still exists on their works is no longer encouraging creativity at all. Lessing points out that the constitution expressly forbids perpetual copyright, but Congress’ continued passage of legislation designed to extend copyrights amounts to an endless copyright.
Most of the music I listen to is in the public domain. Some of it never was copyrighted to begin with. Anybody could have passed off Bach’s music as his own, even in Bach’s time, and there wasn’t much that could be done. That’s obviously a bad system given today’s technology. Still, lack of copyright protection certainly didn’t slow Bach down. There are well over a thousand pieces in the Schmieder catalog. But almost everything created in the last hundred years is still in copyright, and considering the value that corporations place on their intellectual property (Mickey Mouse was created in 1928), it’s doubtful that copyright will ever be anything but permanent again.
Filed under: Literature and Books, Music, Rantings, Technology on December 23rd, 2008 | No Comments »